Do you even have the tools to handle a crisis?

As I continue to work on a training course, one of the items that has come up a couple of times that I do not think that most people will think to include in their planning for a social media crisis is whether or not they have the tools to handle an issue. This extends beyond simply having the ability to conduct your day to day operations. Unfortunately, this is where most companies fail to prepare adequately.

Does your company have the appropriate lighting, camera and sound equipment on site to shoot an interview with a key executive? Why hasn’t your company spent the $1000 that it would need to in order to simply have that around?

Have several of the key individuals in management roles been adequately media trained so that they can perform under the pressure of a crisis and speak on behalf of the company intelligently? Your CEO or VP of Public Relations may not be available in a crisis so you will want to have more than a few people who are ready to answer the press’ questions.

Hopefully, you are now beginning to see why simply just thinking about a potential crisis is enough to be adequately prepared for it. You will need the tools and resources to handle them and the knowledge of how to use those tools. This brings me to the second point of this short article (I’m currently extremely focused on creating the online social media crisis training course), just because you may have purchased access to that online tool that will help you manage the volume of social media content that’s being thrown at your company or that you have bought the lights, camera and sound equipment to record a high quality video anywhere inside your organization, if several members of the organization are not capable of using the tools you may be even worse off than simply not having them.

Make the commitment to having both the resources and knowledge of how to communicate your message inside and out of crisis events.